The Netflix original documentary “The Social Dilemma” controversy highlights significant factors of what employees of Silicon Valley companies address as the modern day ‘social dilemma’. Although confronting when viewing the documentary on a first-hand basis, they seem to promote more fear with only providing a simple insufficient solution, however they miss the opportunity to impose real game changers. 

In hindsight, passing a tax for the collection of data sounds respectable and achievable but, this is only going to limit small business infrastructure in the online realm. Data collection has been prevalent since the days of Netscape, restricting (by taxing) collection of data only damages small reputable business while in fact granting larger companies such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft power. They can always pay the taxes or with recent cases in Australia, out right refuse to do such and remove their services. Google and Facebook came under fire recently from the Australian Government when they passed a new bill demanding these big tech companies to pay tax for media publishing. Data collection has been a problem which has sparked many debates online, from the cookies policy and a demand for a change and targeted advertising. Sadly, there won’t ever be a way around these factors since we don’t control them. Data collection revolves around the mentioned debates before, but how would we be able to slowly but surely dwindle this escalating problem? By following the footsteps of Germany, using more viable options, options which allow users to fully see what is happening. This is the power of open source technology. Germany has begun establishing and moving away from massive IT providers like Microsoft due to the concerns of data collection, they state they are wanting to achieve a more “digital sovereignty”.